Accurate placement is important to the success of many surgical implants and prostheses. Guidance devices for use in surgery have been developed to aid in placement. These systems often take the form of large and bulky robotic guides or navigation systems that can be registered to the patient's anatomy and the pre-operative imaging data. These systems are costly, significantly interrupt the surgeons work flow, require extensive set-up time, extra trained staff and are inconvenient to operate in the limited space of the modern operating theatre. These systems also require lengthy cleaning procedures and are often complicated to set up with the added risk that their digital nature makes them susceptible to errors while guiding the procedure.
Rapid manufacturing/prototyping techniques have been used effectively to produce simple bespoke guides that can be sterilized and brought into the surgical field. Such patient specific instrumentation is used in many surgical specialties such as dentistry, maxillofacial surgery and orthopedics. These guides have been shown to be useful in many different procedures as their bespoke nature allows them to be created to fit specifically onto a particular piece of anatomy in a similar manner to a jigsaw piece fitting a specific location. These guides, can, for example, be produced with holes or cutting slots to facilitate the guidance of surgical tools such as a drill during the procedure.
Previously, guides produced by rapid manufacturing/prototyping techniques have been time consuming to produce with long manufacturing times and logistics chains, often needing post production processing. Commercial 3D printing equipment is expensive and each printed guide had to be individually sterilized. The guides had to be produced in advance of the surgery and thus were unable to be modified once the operation had commenced if they were found to be problematic or the parameters of the operation were changed.
What is needed is an improved method and apparatus for use in the production of surgical guides.